Hester Movie Review - Grade: a PDF

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Film Review Olivia Hester Dr. Pioski October 24, 2017 After Life

What is memory and what does it mean to remember? When it comes to what is remembered, is it only about how vividly once can remember or is it also about the emotional potency woven into what is remembered; how a single smell can transport us back to a singular event and allow us to reside in it once more. Are memories artifacts that we carry around inside of us as proof of existence and can one moment summarize what that life meant? Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda tackles these questions and more as he captures the ineffably beautiful and complex meaning of memory in his film “After Life”. Set in a large, dingy, barracks-like compound, the movie follows the lives of 5 counselors and their 22 new clients for a week, plus a few days. It becomes clear within the first ten minutes that this is no ordinary place and these are no ordinary counselors, but instead this is a limbo between life and after life where these counselors are charged with the profound task of assisting each client with their journey on. The deceased are assigned to a specific counselor for assistance in choosing one memory to take with them into eternity; the catch is they only have three days to decide. Once a memory has been chosen, the staff there will attempt to recreate a personalized movie of the memory for

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each client to reside in as their eternity. Once those films are created, each client is taken to the viewing room to experience the memory and be whisked away to live in eternity through it. As each one reflects back on their life, “After Life” becomes a thoughtful rumination on the meaning and value of life, as well as what eternal happiness is in the context of experience; there is a gentle, old woman, Kiyo Nishimura with the mind of a child, whose happiest memory is sitting/playing beneath cherry blossom trees: a teenager, Kana Yoshino, whose happiest memory is the Splash Mountain ride at Disneyland but her decision is swayed to chose a different memory when she is told that 30 others made the same choice: a pilot, Kenji Yamamoto, whose happiest memory is soaring through clouds: and Nobuko Amano whose memory is of an affair with a married man. For others, such as Yusuke Iseya and Ichiro Watanabe the choice is much more complex; Iseya impulsively refuses to choose any experience from his life as a way of not having to take responsibility for the life he lived and Watanabe searches through his conventional life and marriage for an artifact that speaks meaning into his life. Just as the selection process isn’t easy on the clients, the counselors also face their own struggles through their journey with each client. Takashi Mochizuki struggles with the incredibly complicated case of Ichiro Watanabe - for how do you assist someone in choosing a memory from a life they find to be unfulfilling? Takashi orders tapes of Watanabe’s life for him to view moments from. Though his life seems uneventful to him, a thrilling discovery is made that links Watanabe and Takashi together beyond this place; Watanabe’s wife, Kyoko Watanabe, was also Takashi’s fiancée before he died in his 20s. This eventually leads the audience to the discover that Takashi was not only unable to chose a memory, but that he also has been working in a state of limbo for 50+ years. Takashi, like Watanabe, struggled to choose a memory, but like Iseya, he never chose.

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The two story lines of Watanabe and Takashi are used to bring the plot full circle. After Watanabe moves on to a memory with his wife in a park, he leaves a note for Takashi thanking him for not drawing attention to the fact that they both were with the same woman. This note ,coupled with a blossoming friendship prompts a trainee counselor, Shiori Satonaka, to inadvertently assist Takashi in finally choosing a memory to move on with, an unusual memory that was not made during his life but during his work in limbo. Satonaka discovers that Kyoko had been processed at this place a few years before the events unfolding now and orders the memory of her memory to discover it was in the same park Watanabe chose, but she was with Takashi. It is the realization that he, Takashi, is not only a part of someone else’s eternity but that he could also have such a profound impact on someone else’s happiness is enough to move him from limbo. An aspect I found compelling in “After Life” is its implementation of sequential transitions to progress the narrative arc, emphasize themes, and engage the audience with a more cognitively active viewing. Scott McCloud talks about an audience engaging phenomenon in comics called closure. It is the act of observing the parts but perceiving the whole; a mental filling of the gaps in what we observe that allows readers to comprehend action and meaning between two seemingly unrelated panels. This phenomenon occurs in between the negative space of panels as the comic book transitions from scene to scene: those transitions are moment-tomoment, action-to-action, subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, aspect-to-aspect, and non-sequitur. Japanese works, by contrast to American works, use fewer scene transitions and when they are used it is usually one of two kinds: moment-to-moment and aspect-to-aspect transitions. Even more compelling is that aspect-to-aspect transitions, though used in Japanese works, are still very uncommon yet we see them being used outside here to create multiple deep meanings in the

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engagement with the audience. The film is visually muted, slow to progress, and doesn’t try to poeticize the story through an aesthetic look, but instead uses a collage of scenes on reflection, dialogue, and interactions of individuals yoked together for a greater meaning. Moment-to-moment transitions happen when a single action is portrayed in a series of moments, much like the sequential scenes where Shiori is among the living to collect pictures for authentication of memories. It is revealed through moment-to-moment transitions that she used the trip for her own purposes. Though it isn’t explicitly stated until later that she wasted the trip, the audience can fill in the gaps in between scenes that she is not taking pictures of the memories discussed, and she is lingering. It is these same moment-to-moment transitions that lead into larger aspect-to-aspect transitions. Aspect-to-aspect transition move from one aspect of a place, idea, or mood to another. Theses transitions are used heavily in the film to move the audience around the compound, for example the transition of scenes from hallway, to snow, to moon, to bedroom, to Shiori after Takashi has moved on creates a somber, pensive mood surrounding not only the building and those inside of it, but it also uses that somber, pensiveness to draw out the question of what it means to remain behind after someone we cherished has moved on. These beautifully arranged shots of silhouetted figures capture an essence of remembering as experience in a way that is as imperfect as memory and challenges what it means to say, “I remember.” The act of choosing one memory to spend eternity ushers in an uncompelling element of skepticism: is there a gap between the remembered and the recreated, and would the initial promise of experiencing your happiest time forever begin to diminish the metaphysical idea of structured reality? Augustine would say that evil is a necessary part of the world in a way that without bad there can be no good – that everything in existence must co-exist in balance. Though

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the perception of the afterlife is subjective, there seems to be an objective agreement throughout society of a continued existence within it – a structured reality. If eternity is happiness promised through dwelling in a certain memory, will it remain happy through eternity if there is no counter-part to that happiness? “After Life” finally gives the viewer a glimpse of eternity through the eyes of Takashi near the end as he experiences his memory and moves with it to the afterlife. While the audience is initially led to believe that his eternity is sitting on a bench in the filming studio reliving an introspective moment of profound truth, we discover that his eternal view also includes the ones behind the camera, the ones he worked and bonded with. This once more challenges the notion of eternal happiness, but through the gaps between the authentic remembering and the hastilyrecreated details of the movie. This could potentially provide the balance of negativity that fuels the happiness of eternity. Did Takashi intend for this to happen when he chose this memory or is it an unintended accident, and what does it mean in the scope of his eternity? I would like to think it was the former of the two and that people he met along his journey in limbo are enough to sustain him in eternity. This isn’t a film about bad people or good people, rich people or poor people; there are no classes or race here; and death has made an equal of them all. This is about people from different walks of life working together to discover that happiness in life is not of the physical world. Instead, it comes from within through a remembered living in a moment, belonging somewhere, and experiencing the feeling of being alive. It is through these moments of introspective self discovery that a deeper and unique understanding of our own interpretations is given to this film....